Some excerpts from Anchorage news.  Phyllis

 

WASHINGTON -- Shell Oil said it has no plans to leave Alaska, despite the Obama administration's decision Thursday to postpone until at least next year the company's exploratory drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday the White House stalled offshore Arctic plans for a year to ensure that if companies eventually can move forward there, they'll have the benefit of the findings from a presidential commission. That commission has been asked to examine the weaknesses in the national offshore plan that led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion last month, and to recommend ways to keep such an event from happening again.

DISAPPOINTMENT IN CONGRESS

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said he was disappointed with the president's move and called Shell's plans for the Arctic "a casualty" of the April 20 tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. Begich said his staff had worked closely with Shell, including meeting in recent days with Salazar's deputy, Tom Strickland.

"We have worked with them to meet the standards that the agencies have required of them. They have moved through litigation, and most recently at the request of the administration, increased their safety efforts in order to reassure the administration that they were going far beyond what was required of them," Begich said.

As far as he understands the administration's move, though, it's a "pause," Begich said, not an outright halt in exploration.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said she feared the administration's move was a "backhanded way to kill offshore development in Alaska" and that she thought Shell could have drilled safely this summer.

"We must learn all we can from this tragedy to limit the risk of anything like it ever happening again, but we can't simply halt all oil and gas production offshore. Our standard of living and the nation's security depend on domestic oil and gas production," she said.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, blamed the decision as being a knee-jerk reaction to "the hysteria of interest groups that want to cripple our country."

"The kind of event that happened in the Gulf, while tragic, is so uncommon. It is akin to an American jetliner crashing," he said. "If a plane goes down, we don't stop flying. We figure out what went wrong and correct the problem."

RELIEF ON THE NORTH SLOPE

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell complained the federal move was "based on fear, not sound science."

"Alaskans have experienced firsthand the ravages of an oil spill with the Exxon Valdez in 1989," he said. "We never want to repeat that experience, and our hearts go out to Gulf Coast residents suffering from the effects of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. On the other hand, Shell's proposed exploration plan in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas has been reviewed extensively."

But environmental groups reveled in their victory and vowed